Zompist Bboard Again

Unrelated: I've read in German media that Trump supposedly wants to introduce, or has already introduced, tariffs on foreign movies, supposedly in reaction to Hollywood's economic troubles. What? I thought he and his followers hated Hollywood!

doctor shark wrote: ↑Sun May 04, 2025 8:03 am (notably all in the south of Germany due to the partition of Germany during the Cold War: the American sector included the states Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hessen, and Rhineland-Palatinate),

Correction: Rhineland-Palatinate and the South-Western part of BW*) were in the French zone. OTOH, Bremen, a Northern State, was also in the American zone because America wanted a seaport they controlled.
*) Immediately after the war, three states were formed on the territory of today's Baden-Württemberg; Südbaden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern in the French zone and Württtemberg-Baden in the American zone. They were united into BW in 1952.

This article has some good recommendations at the end, for people in the US: https://www.science.org/content/blog-po ... -worldview

keenir wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 10:16 pmas I understand it, military bases also allow the military officers to compare notes with their opposite numbers, encouraging the sharing of not just permitted military information, but also linguistic and cultural information, such as cooking and ornamentation.

this is all true, but they've got a bit of a high body count, as far as cultural exchange programs go.

Starbeam wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 9:24 am I would rather remove the US hegemony by directly toppling it, not having additional hegemonies to "counterbalance". Did you know there's plenty of cases where each power cooperates, even if that's not their goal in the long run?

quite so, and in my estimation, that's kinda happening, though not quite: sure, china may dominate a few industries [rare earth refining, consumer goods manufacturing, solar panels] but they're not nearly as powerful as the us, and even less powerful are, to use CIA speak, the rest of "america's geopolitical adversaries". there's really no one halfway near supplanting the us, but it's not going to topple either (save some extreme case, like a californexit or a civil war that doesn't end in reunification). rather, what might happen is that it'll wither from sole global superpower to most powerful regional power.

zompist wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 4:34 pm * Look at what your favorite fascists are doing: shutting down USAID, not the CIA, expanding the military budget, bombing another country, talking about invading allies. Do you seriously think their motivation was "gosh we should not do coups against Torco, we'll stop that"? If these goons, the same party that actually did that coup against your country, don't think USAID was vital to their goals, why do you think it was?

indeed that's not their motivation. i think the answer to your question is something like this: the pre-trumpian republicans (neocons) and the democratic party had a sort of mutual understanding, a consensus as to how to exert america's power abroad: through a combination of multilateralism (with multilateral orgs hopefully being in the pocket of the US), soft power, a global system of free trade reliant on the centrality of the dollar, and all the rest of what we've seen between the 90s and now. the magas, on the other hand, seem to want to abandon that strategy. I don't think their new strategy will be more effective in keeping the us on top, and it isn't working out great thus far.

What vaccine program in Cuba? So far as I'm aware both the US and Cuban governments prohibit such cooperation.

At this point it's almost charming that you are so concerned about the last authoritarian communist government in Latin America. The one that the US has not succeeded in ending, despite 65 years of trying. It must be the least successful intervention ever.

indeed it is. castro survived something like 500 assasination attempts, and died a very old man. that being said, Cuba is an excellent example of what happens to countries that aren't very strong and still don't do as the us says. the blockade is a very grave crime against humanity.

you're right, though, i was misremembering it wasn't a vaccine program, it was an HIV thing. You know us reds, we get access to all sorts of secret classified information through our secret commie channels.

No? But you lauded the Soviet-installed government''s support for women's rights. This sounds a lot to me like (say) Brits proud that they brought railroads to India. How come Soviet clients' support for women's rights is wonderful, while American clients' support for women's rights is bad?

well yes, women's rights are a good thing the soviets did as part of their conquest of afghanistan (conquest is an old fashioned word, but you get what i mean). overall I still wish they hadn't done it. Still, why is couping cuba for democracy good but couping afghanistan for women's rights bad? again, this is geopolitics, this is a conflict between demons from hell... what matters is outcomes, which will be less bad for people, not whether "the good guys" win.

(...) which countries are kowtowing to Trump? China is not. Southeast Asians are planning for a non-US-led future. Canada and Mexico and Europe are shrugging and doing the same(...) You already live in a multipolar world.

I mean, yeah, it's starting to happen... which is what I predicted. we live in a more multipolar world now than we did under Obama, that's for sure.

You're right that it's not only the us that coups countries, of course... but they do coup a lot of 'em.

But I would suggest that the Pax Americana may not, in the long run, look so terrible (...) Do you want a world so multipolar that 1.6 billion people can have themselves a nuclear war? Or is it maybe not that bad if an American president makes a few phone calls to calm them down? At the moment I think the reasonable worry is not that he'll make that call but that he won't.

Yeah, no, I know you'd prefer your country to keep being world police. But there's a big cost for it that it's easy not to account for. Even if one isn't a communist, and for all of the bad outcomes of the way it works, it's hard to deny that the neoliberal economic model isn't working anymore. when these systems start to fail, the normal, natural thing is for different countries to try different things, eventually one finds a cool model that works, and others adopt it. of course it's not that simple, countries exert influence on their neighbours blabla, but there is some degree systemic experimentation that's clearly observable in history: countries other than france took note of the american and french revolution and deeply adjusted the way they themselves operated as a result of it, rolling back the privileges of the aristocracy, implementing constitutional monarchy and all the rest of it. a lot of countries responded to the russian revolution by improving labour laws etcetera. but this process does not work after the establishment of monopolarity, not because of some inherent feature of monopolarity but because the us took a policy of "my system or else". and that's what we all have -except for pariah states- the us system. and it's breaking down pretty fast. the fact russia can so effectively fund fascists everywhere is, sure, because russia has money, but also because neoliberalism is so broken that any so called "populist" with enough reach and enough of an angry tone can get a LOT of traction. and that sort of potential for disruption -which only right-wingers exploit these days, the left-of-centers being weirdly institutional these days- is probably to do with dysfunction.

@Lerisama: of course they were genuinely afraid of the USSR, are you kidding me? it was aggressive af. not as much as the US, but not far behind it either. look, you'd be mistaken reading people but I don't think they were the good guys, or that russia is the good guys, or china, or north korea, or orban, etcetera

Torco wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 10:11 pm

keenir wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 10:16 pmas I understand it, military bases also allow the military officers to compare notes with their opposite numbers, encouraging the sharing of not just permitted military information, but also linguistic and cultural information, such as cooking and ornamentation.

this is all true, but they've got a bit of a high body count, as far as cultural exchange programs go.

the only thing I've read, that matches that statement,* is how the CIA owns 1/3 to 1/2 of Guam....which was not good for the locals or for the native birds. (the latter, thanks to all the snakes coming in on/through plane wheel wells)

* = beyond that one thing i mention here, every time I try to figure that statement of yours here, my result is, to quote the Red Books {of conservation}, "DD - Data Deficient".

Torco wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 10:11 pm @Lerisama: of course they were genuinely afraid of the USSR, are you kidding me? it was aggressive af. not as much as the US, but not far behind it either. look, you'd be mistaken reading people but I don't think they were the good guys, or that russia is the good guys, or china, or north korea, or orban, etcetera

So, have I misread you, or do you subscribe to one of the following positions:

• The cost of multipolarity is always worth it, no matter how high. If so, if¹ say, Brazil got fascist dictatorshiped, invaded Paraguay and made noises about wanting more, would you still support its rise to a superpower? If not, why not, and how is this situation different to that of Russia & China?
• Russia² and/or China were as evil as America, but at some point in the past, they became beneign, Torco-approved overlords

Also, how much evidence do you have for your theory that multipolarity leads to fewer coups? According to Wikipedia's list of coups and coup attempts³, and using 1970–1989 and 1990–2009 as samples of multipolarity and unipolarity respectively, there were 159 (just under 8 coup attempts a year⁴) in the first period and ‘only’ 113 (still over 5 per year) in the second. I assume the reason is that if you make there be only one bloc, then certain superpowers stop worrying excessively over how country X might join them, and so coup less, not more. I'm not sure what case of multipolarity you want to return to, the good old days of the cold war, where no country, from San Marino to the CAR was too small or insignificant to coup? Or do you want to return to the pre-WWI era where diplomacy was a job done by the great powers for the great powers, and even relatively major non-great power countries could suffer being carved up on a whim⁵

¹ To try and get a South American example, however implausible
² Yes, I know it was the USSR at this point
³ Standard caveats apply: this is Wikipedia, not the fount of all knowledge, I didn't check anything, my counting/adding may be slightly wrong
⁴ Although it does seem to have a very generous definition of a coup attempt
⁵ C.f. Poland. 3 times.

Edit: links got messed up

Torco wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 10:11 pm the magas, on the other hand, seem to want to abandon that strategy. I don't think their new strategy will be more effective in keeping the us on top, and it isn't working out great thus far.

Depends on what it is, doesn't it? If it's "ally with Russia and against all democratic nations", it might be doing just what they want.

Still, why is couping cuba for democracy good but couping afghanistan for women's rights bad?

What is wrong with you?

Yeah, no, I know you'd prefer your country to keep being world police.

What is wrong with you?

It's bad enough that you're a cheerleader for fascists. You don't also have to be an asshole.

Lērisama wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 1:57 am Also, how much evidence do you have for your theory that multipolarity leads to fewer coups? According to Wikipedia's list of coups and coup attempts³, and using 1970–1989 and 1990–2009 as samples of multipolarity and unipolarity respectively, there were 159 (just under 8 coup attempts a year⁴) in the first period and ‘only’ 113 (still over 5 per year) in the second. I assume the reason is that if you make there be only one bloc, then certain superpowers stop worrying excessively over how country X might join them, and so coup less, not more. I'm not sure what case of multipolarity you want to return to, the good old days of the cold war, where no country, from San Marino to the CAR was too small or insignificant to coup? Or do you want to return to the pre-WWI era where diplomacy was a job done by the great powers for the great powers, and even relatively major non-great power countries could suffer being carved up on a whim⁵

That's a good point. The bipolar Cold War was terrible for most Third World countries. It's not just coups, it's dictatorships and non-development.

A set of fascist Great Powers is not going to be more just or safe or prosperous, except in Torco's accelerationist dreams.

Lērisama wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 1:57 am[*] The cost of multipolarity is always worth it, no matter how high. If so, if¹ say, Brazil got fascist dictatorshiped, invaded Paraguay and made noises about wanting more, would you still support its rise to a superpower? If not, why not, and how is this situation different to that of Russia & China?
¹ To try and get a South American example, however implausible

well, if you want to make sure nobody mistakes it for reality (as unreal as reality has been seeming lately, thanks to DJT and friends), maybe say its the machinations of Zombie Solano Lopez arising on Y2K to defeat his old enemies⁶, and then continue more successfully than even Simon Bolivar managed.


⁶ The first time I ever learned about the War of the Triple Alliance, it was like hearing that the Isle of Man went to war with the British Isles and a good chunk of Continental Europe...and not only nearly won, but fared better in the battles than one might have presumed beforehand.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 3:17 am

Yeah, no, I know you'd prefer your country to keep being world police.

What is wrong with you?

It's bad enough that you're a cheerleader for fascists. You don't also have to be an asshole.

Torco seems to be one of those people who have a clear script in their head that tells them what everyone in the world of politics should say, and then assume that everyone does say what's in the script, and therefore don't feel the need to pay attention to what people actually say.

keenir wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 3:50 am

⁶ The first time I ever learned about the War of the Triple Alliance, it was like hearing that the Isle of Man went to war with the British Isles and a good chunk of Continental Europe...and not only nearly won, but fared better in the battles than one might have presumed beforehand.

Hey, Paraguay may not be as big as Brazil or Argentina, but it is a good deal bigger than the Isle of Man!

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 4:32 am

keenir wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 3:50 am

⁶ The first time I ever learned about the War of the Triple Alliance, it was like hearing that the Isle of Man went to war with the British Isles and a good chunk of Continental Europe...and not only nearly won, but fared better in the battles than one might have presumed beforehand.

Hey, Paraguay may not be as big as Brazil or Argentina, but it is a good deal bigger than the Isle of Man!

that is true.

not the most precise analogy i've ever made, i admit; my aim was just to convey the sheer level of surprise I'd felt at the time.
(i think the British Isles and that chunk of Continent, are smaller than either Brazil or Argentina, if it helps any)

if you like, I can delete that posts of mine, and forget i said them. I did not mean to offend or anger anyone.

The end of the Cold War significantly helped the world, because the many dictators and factions in civil wars across the world were to a large extent not needed by the Great Powers anymore and could be dispensed with. This is why so many dictatorships fell and civil wars ended soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. "Multipolarity" means going back to those bad old days. Is this what you want, Torco? Or have you conveniently forgotten this?

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 5:34 pm The end of the Cold War significantly helped the world, because the many dictators and factions in civil wars across the world were to a large extent not needed by the Great Powers anymore and could be dispensed with. This is why so many dictatorships fell and civil wars ended soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. "Multipolarity" means going back to those bad old days. Is this what you want, Torco? Or have you conveniently forgotten this?

I kinda think he does, because he has a very benign view of the USSR and the dictators of Cuba and Afghanistan, because commies good gringos bad. Every time he tries to throw in some nuance he contradicts it with more commies good gringos bad.

But multipolarity doesn't have to mean the Cold War, or the looming cabal of fascist superpowers. I think Torco is right to prefer that developing nations have options for development: if the US doesn't support a country's needs, maybe the EU or China will.

Ironically, what a lot of people still haven't grasped is that the old non-West has progressed by leaps and bounds. Huge nations like India and China are no longer dirt-poor and starving, and we're getting new manufacturing powers all across SE Asia. A nation like Brazil is not composed of rich people and slums any more. Africa still has a lot of problems, but there are some big success stories, like Botswana, whose per capita GNP is almost that of Brazil ($19K vs $21K PPP).

zompist wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 3:17 am

Yeah, no, I know you'd prefer your country to keep being world police.

What is wrong with you?
It's bad enough that you're a cheerleader for fascists. You don't also have to be an asshole.

how am i being an asshole though? america world police *is* what unipolarity means, and you think remaining unipolar under the us aegis is good for the world. I'm not calling you -or anyone else- a fascist or a hypocrite or an idiot or nothing... I'm not even saying your position is unreasonable or dumb, just that I have a different view, namely that america world police is not good for the world, for the reasons I've laid out: lack of political competition, the rule of neoliberalism-or-coup,

Lērisama wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 1:57 am

Torco wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 10:11 pm @Lerisama: of course they were genuinely afraid of the USSR, are you kidding me? it was aggressive af. not as much as the US, but not far behind it either. look, you'd be mistaken reading people but I don't think they were the good guys, or that russia is the good guys, or china, or north korea, or orban, etcetera

So, have I misread you, or do you subscribe to one of the following positions:

• The cost of multipolarity is always worth it, no matter how high. If so, if¹ say, Brazil got fascist dictatorshiped, invaded Paraguay and made noises about wanting more, would you still support its rise to a superpower? If not, why not, and how is this situation different to that of Russia & China?
• Russia² and/or China were as evil as America, but at some point in the past, they became beneign, Torco-approved overlords

between "us hegemony good" and "multipolarity necessarily good" there's a whole range of positions, including "in general, it's better if there's less foreign intervention between countries". of course there are exceptions to this, sometimes a country starts doing way too objectionable stuff. a military intervention during the holocaust was good, though the interventors had their own agenda of course, geopolitics is 3d chess after all, but still: it was good that germany was intervened back then. but as a general rule, i think it's fair to say it'd be better if there was less foreign intervention overall. there's many arguments for this

• when one country exerts control over others you get this phenomenon where value is syphoned out of the controlled country towards the controller.
  
  countries that don't rule themselves, but are ruled from some faraway metropolis, tend to be ruled more poorly than if they were ruled by themselves, simply cause the interest of the rulers are different than those of the ruled. this is the same dynamic that happens between classes: when owners have the final say in how businesses are run and not workers, they're ran in such a way that it's a lot nicer to be an owner than a worker.
  
  democracy... perhaps i should say democratic-ness? is good. here i mean not just the trappings of three powers senate and congress habeas corpus blabla, but the general degree to which governance is exerted more or less aligned with the governed population's preferences. if a country is ruled by another country, this good of democraticness doesn't obtain (even if the country fulfills all sorts of technical criteria for being A Democracy)

in general, it's good if people groups rule themselves (as far as that concept goes, it's not without its own ambiguities and what do we mean a people group and etcetera etcetera, but still), and it's bad if one people group rule all the others, just like it's bad when one guy is dictator, and it's good if we all just figure out what the rules are together, peacefully and democratically. and having a world hegemon that rules the planet, even if it is a democracy (to the degree the us was one, which is not zero but also not 100%) does not preclude the harms of not having self-determination (because for as little as american politicans care about the american public, they care even less about the nepalese, or chilean, public: we don't vote in the world government, or world's most important government, or leader of the free world, or whatever you wanna call it). but come to think of it, isn't self-determination also in like the charter of various multilateral orgs? lmao i'm sounding like an UN bureaucrat, but i guess i do share this idea that a rules-based multilateral order would be a nice thing. of course, it's not going to be more than scribbles on paper as long as there's one country that can call all, or most, of the shots.

and the us is, right now, kind of exactly that. and it's losing its position of primacy, and i think that's good. that's all, i don't love putin, i don't wish i was a russian strelki fighting for slava rosiya or whatever, i don't want more orbans... i think there's three things happening here: the us is losing its primacy, and also the far right is rising up globally, and also a lot of countries are going not-quite-fascist-but-definitely-monarchoid-authoritarian-regimes, like russia, china (which was a lot less unipersonal before Xi), india etcetera. i wish only the first of those three was the case.

The problem with 'multipolarity' is that the potential poles are not benign at all, and contention between great powers means conflict in countries outside the superpowers as well. This is what we saw during the Cold War ─ superpowers used countries across the world as proxies. As much as you complain about coups instigated by superpowers, the matter is that both superpowers instigated coups and fed civil wars as a means of exerting power against one another globally. This is the reality of 'multipolarity'. Conversely, 'unipolarity' means there is fewer coups and civil wars as there is less jockeying for global power by superpowers.

Torco wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 6:30 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 3:17 am

Yeah, no, I know you'd prefer your country to keep being world police.

What is wrong with you?
It's bad enough that you're a cheerleader for fascists. You don't also have to be an asshole.

how am i being an asshole though? america world police *is* what unipolarity means, and you think remaining unipolar under the us aegis is good for the world. I'm not calling you -or anyone else- a fascist or a hypocrite or an idiot or nothing... I'm not even saying your position is unreasonable or dumb, just that I have a different view, namely that america world police is not good for the world, for the reasons I've laid out: lack of political competition, the rule of neoliberalism-or-coup,

You're being an asshole because the only alternative you see to commies good gringos bad is gringos good commies bad. So anyone who disagrees with you has to be misrepresented as a supporter of everything bad the US has ever done.

Basically when you say "your position" you are making it up. Maybe it comes easy to you because, after all, commies good gringos bad. But I've carefully explained my actual position many times, so you are not misinformed but lying.

The contrast between Zompist proclaiming hope about our situation and everything I am reading elsewhere feels ever more jarring.

Trump administration ‘looking at’ suspending habeas corpus for migrants, Stephen Miller says
Newark Mayor Arrested While Protesting At ICE Detention Center

malloc wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 8:38 pm The contrast between Zompist proclaiming hope about our situation and everything I am reading elsewhere feels ever more jarring.

BREAKING NEWS: FAMOUS DOOMSCROLLER FINDS ONLY BAD NEWS WHILE DOOMSCROLLING !

malloc wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 8:38 pm The contrast between Zompist proclaiming hope about our situation and everything I am reading elsewhere feels ever more jarring.

Trump administration ‘looking at’ suspending habeas corpus for migrants, Stephen Miller says
Newark Mayor Arrested While Protesting At ICE Detention Center

I suggest reading the article I posted here earlier. Being in the US, you are in a better position that I am to fight against these actions.